When we think about the most dire threats to our planet, poor sanitation rarely tops the list. And yet it’s a significant (and in some cases immediate) contributor to sickness and pollution in both rural and urban areas.

Every day, around 2 million tons of human waste are disposed of in water channels. Among other contributing factors, this sanitation problem limits the availability of uncontaminated drinking water—especially in developing nations, which often lack the proper treatment and drainage facilities. Overall, 2.5 billion people around the world currently lack access to improved sanitation, and 27 percent of urban dwellers in developing nations do not have access to piped water in their homes.

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These sanitation issues apply to U.S. cities as well—albeit on a much smaller scale. As America’s urban populations continue to grow, so too does the demand for clean water. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that 40 states will experience some kind of water shortage in the next 10 years.

These shortages negatively impact water quality in unincorporated communities, as CityLab’s Laura Bliss has chronicled in her series on the water crisis in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Meanwhile, urbanized areas run the risk of sewer systems clogging and spilling over into rivers and streams due to excessive groundwater or stormwater. The EPA estimates anywhere from 23,000 to 75,000 overflows of sanitary-sewer systems each year in the U.S.

The right infrastructure becomes critical in preserving water quality and preventing a shortage of clean drinking water. Unfortunately, most of the technology employed by cities today lags behind the latest innovations.

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Currently, only one gold standard for sanitation exists: the combined sewer system that is already in place in developed cities. In a September post for The Atlantic, the author Mary Anna Evans describes the initial design of this “modern” technology:

The EPA calls combined sewers “remnants of the country's early infrastructure.” The first sewers weren’t designed to handle the constant and huge stream of wastes from our toilets, because they were invented when we didn’t have any toilets. Sewers were originally built to solve the problems of cities that were flooded with their own refuse—garbage, animal manure, and human waste left in the open rather than in a privy or latrine—during every rainstorm.

The fact that cities still rely on a technology that predates toilets points to just how archaic this system has become. Brian Arbogast, the director of the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that “there’s not an obvious market demand for changing the way we do sanitation in the developed world.” And yet combined-sewer systems expend huge amounts of water and energy, in turn posing a serious long-term threat to our environment.

For the past few years, Arbogast and his team have worked with partners to develop new sanitation technologies. One of the most promising is a “reinvented toilet” that essentially functions as its own treatment plant. The concept is part of a broader initiative called the “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” that aims to deliver sustainable sanitation to the 2.5 billion people who lack access.

Unlike traditional sewer systems, the reinvented toilet would harvest energy from actual human waste to kill germs in the water itself. The result is sterile water that’s safe enough to wash with, as well as human waste that can be re-purposed for healthy, odorless fertilizer. The main challenge is keeping costs low enough to reasonably implement the toilet across cities. With this in mind, the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program has priced it at no more than five cents per user per day—the same cost as many public toilets in developing nations.

The Gates Foundation has also partnered with the manufacturing company Janicki Bioenergy on a device called the Omni Processor, which is able to convert feces into safe drinking water. The device’s steam engine makes its own energy for burning human waste so cities or towns don’t have to resort to energy-draining activities like burning diesel fuel. The Omni Processor was recently implemented in Dakar, Senegal, through an auspicious pilot program, with plans to eventually sell the product to wealthier nations.

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If developing nations are turning toward new sanitation technology, why isn’t this shift happening in developed cities as well? One obvious explanation is that developed cities already have a functioning sewer system. But the real answer, Arbogast says, goes beyond the fact that “developed cities aren’t really innovating.” He contends that new technology will have to be tested in developing nations before developed ones are likely to follow suit.

“I firmly believe,” he says, “that if this technology can get out there in the market [in developing countries] … you’ll start to see building codes changing to incentivize the use of waterless toilets or to take the load off waste-water-treatment plants.”

Until then, it’s developing cities that require the most attention. The World Health Organization reports that 3.4 million people—mainly children—die each year from water-related diseases like cholera, dysentery, or typhoid. In a city like Dhaka, Bangladesh, Arbogast says, only 2 percent of waste is being treated at a plant. And in many cases, septic tanks carry human waste directly into the street—leaving city residents exposed to numerous pathogens. “No community has ever put themselves out of poverty without addressing sanitation,” Arbogast says.

As dire as these circumstances may be, sustainable sanitation is rarely the focus of global discussions. During COP21, Arbogast gave a talk on the relationship between sanitation and climate change in hopes of landing the issue on the international radar. At the conference, Arbogast says, many were surprised to hear how direct and devastating the link has become. Despite being familiar with the sanitation problem in developing communities, many conference-goers had overlooked the energy-draining and water-depleting activities of combined sewer systems.

Thankfully, these realizations are not too late. With innovations like the Omni Processor and the reinvented toilet on the cusp of completion, cities can start to think about replacing sewer systems with more environmentally friendly devices. Arbogast thinks these technologies will be ready for purchase in just a few years. Developed or not, those cities that make it a priority to update their waste disposal systems will certainly be more prepared for impending environmental challenges.

“Cities that invest in non-sewer sanitation are going to be far more resilient both today,” Arbogast says, “and even more so in the face of climate change in the future.”

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.

“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”

Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the countryhas deep historic roots and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.